Thursday, April 24, 2014

In his recently published autobiography, Don Brash reflects
on the contribution made to many Western countries by minority groups that had
been forced to leave their homelands because of discrimination.

He theorises that people under pressure are driven to
succeed. Brash specifically mentions Huguenots, Quakers and Jews.

This resonated with me. My forebears on my father’s side
were Huguenots – Protestants who fled France in the late 17th
century to escape persecution by the Catholic majority. They settled in tolerant
Denmark, from where my grandfather emigrated to New Zealand in 1890.

Huguenots spread themselves around the world. They were
among the earliest settlers in New York and also migrated in large numbers to
the Cape of Good Hope – hence the frequency with which French surnames, such as
du Plessis, de Villiers, Joubert and du Toit, occur in South Africa.

The Jewish diaspora, of course, is well known. Ashkenazi
Jews, many of them driven out of central and eastern Europe by campaigns of
harassment known as pogroms, have been hugely influential in business, science and
the arts in the United States, in particular.

They have also punched well above their weight in New
Zealand. One of our most energetic early premiers, Julius Vogel, was Jewish and
Abraham Hort was a prominent figure in early Wellington. Woolf Fisher was a
founder of Fisher and Paykel and Bendix Hallenstein established the retail
chain that bears his name. In the brewing and retail industries, the Myers and
Nathan families have been key players for generations.

Many New Zealand Jews were not only highly successful in
business but were, and are, generous benefactors to the community. Whether this
arises from a sense of gratitude to a country that offered them freedom from
persecution, I couldn’t say.

But back to my own forebears. On my paternal grandmother’s
side, I’m descended from Danes who left their homeland after the province of
Schleswig, where they lived, was invaded by Prussia in 1864. The decisive
battle of the Danish-Prussian war was fought around their farmhouse.

Rather than live under the rule of Germans who were bent on
suppressing Danish language and culture, they emigrated in 1875 and settled in
the Manawatu, where they prospered as farmers, timber millers and merchants.

My mother, meanwhile, came from an Irish Catholic
background. Her forebears left Ireland in the 19th century for the same reason as millions of others:
poverty, religious discrimination and subjection to British rule.

My wife’s family, too, came to New Zealand looking for a new
life, free of the bitter experiences of the Old World.

Her Polish parents had been forcibly transported to
Germany in 1944 and put to work in Nazi labour camps. They had witnessed
indescribably shocking things and both lost their entire families.

When the war ended, Poland had effectively been taken over
by Stalin’s Soviet Union and there was no point in returning. Some of their
friends made the mistake of going back and were never heard from again.

Rendered stateless, my in-laws spent nearly 20 years looking
for a country that would take them in. In the end it was New Zealand that
welcomed them – this after friends had emigrated here and written to them
saying what a wonderful place it was.

These family stories are probably not exceptional. We are a
society of immigrants. The circumstances they left behind may have differed,
but virtually everyone who came here – including, for all we know, the first
Maori arrivals – was motivated by a desire for a better life.

It’s true of the Dalmatians who came here to dig kauri gum
in the late 19th century, it’s true of the Pacific Islanders who
came here to work in car assembly plants in the 1960s, and it’s true of
everyone who arrived in between. Why else would people uproot themselves and
risk an uncertain future in a strange land?

Perhaps not all of them had experienced the acute pressure
that Don Brash refers to in his book – the type that threatens people’s very
identity and existence; but I believe they all came here determined to
construct a better society than the ones they had left behind. And they
probably included a disproportionate share of determined and aspirational
people – risk-takers who were not prepared to go on living in unsatisfactory
circumstances.

I think that helps explain the sort of society we have
become. By world standards we are a liberal, tolerant and even idealistic
society. That was confirmed in the recent international Social Progress Index
which ranked New Zealand No 1 in the world – and most significantly, scored us
highest on freedom, tolerance and inclusiveness.

We have not only left behind poverty, repression and lack of
opportunity. Crucially, we seem also to have left behind old feuds and
rivalries.

To backtrack momentarily, my wife’s family, although
Catholic (like most Poles), was sponsored on arrival in New Zealand by a Methodist community in
Palmerston North, which found them a house and helped them settle in. Even in
the 1960s, when religious differences were far more pronounced than they are
now, this seemed to signal that New Zealand was able to rise above petty
sectarianism.

Mercifully, anti-semitism has never taken root here. It’s as
if there’s an unstated understanding that the divisions of the Old World –
whether it’s Jew versus Christian, Irish Catholic versus Irish Protestant,
Croat versus Serb or whatever – have no place in the new one.

And long may it remain so. I reckon there should be an
imaginary quarantine bin at airports where arriving immigrants discard old
prejudices in the same way as they dispose of prohibited foodstuffs.

Of course we’re not perfect, as a contemptible Wellington footballer
demonstrated recently when he made monkey noises at a rival player from Africa.
But we should be proud that we’re an inclusive society, as has been shown by
the way we’ve painlessly adapted to greatly increased inflows of Asian
immigrants. We are now one of the world’s most cosmopolitan societies – a
remarkable transformation that has been achieved with minimal fuss.

In an election year, when rival politicians will be doing
their best to paint the blackest possible picture of their opponents, it does
no harm to remind ourselves that this is actually the Most Civilised Little Country
in the World.

Saturday, April 12, 2014

I was watching the TV news last night when there was a loud
bang from the adjoining dining room. It sounded like someone had thrown
something hard against our French doors.

I went to investigate and there, just visible in the rapidly
fading light, was a handsome morepork, flat on its back on our deck. It was a truly
pathetic sight. Its legs were moving feebly but it appeared to be out cold and
I wondered whether it had done its dash.

What do you do in these situations? I figured that the
stress of being picked up and handled by a human being might only have hastened
its demise. I convinced myself that the best course was to leave it in peace in
the hope that it would recover of its own accord. Fortunately it wasn’t cold or
wet outside.

While my wife kept an eye on it, I got on the phone to seek advice. My call
to the Bird Rescue organisation in Auckland was diverted to the SPCA, where the
call taker – obviously not an SPCA person, but someone merely manning the
phones – said I’d have to contact my local branch. This I did, and got an
after-hours cellphone number where there was no reply. I left a message.

Meanwhile things were happening on the deck. Somehow the
poor bird had struggled to its feet. In the light of a torch (it was now
completely dark) we could see it standing motionless, its head drooping forward.
It looked desperately forlorn.

I went back to the computer and looked for advice on handling
stunned birds. I quickly found what appeared to be an authoritative article
from North America which said, essentially, that the first thing to do was
ensure it was safe from predators such as cats. (This was my wife’s first
thought anyway, which is why she stood vigil at the French doors.)

Beyond that, it suggested allowing time for the bird to
recover on its own and if necessary, carefully picking it up, placing it in a
box and leaving it in a safe place where its system could “reboot” (nice analogy).

By this time, probably half an hour had passed. Then a shout
from the dining room announced that the bird had flown. Phew.

The incident left me pondering a couple of questions. The
first was, why do moreporks seem so accident prone? I always assumed they were
skilled night-time flyers, but I’ve already written here about the dead one we
found tangled in the branches of our plum tree a couple of years ago. A man
from DOC told me they sometimes get disoriented in stormy weather, but last night
was calm. So why had one crashed headlong into the side of the house? It’s the
sort of clumsiness you expect of kereru, not ruru.

The other thing I was left wondering was why we should be so
moved by the fate of a mere bird. Nature kills creatures every day in all sorts
of cruel ways. Having established what the noise was from the dining room, I could
have rationalised that this was simply Darwinism in action and gone back to
watching TV. But something caused my wife and I to fret about the morepork’s
survival, and we were both hugely relieved when it appeared to recover.

Was it because a morepork, with its soft, mottled plumage,
is a beautiful bird when you see one up close (a privilege we don't normally get)?
Was it because it’s a native bird, and therefore
considered more precious than an introduced species? Was it because there’s
something uniquely appealing about the call of the morepork in the nighttime,
when everything else is silent?

Was it, in other words, mere dribbling sentiment? Intrinsically,
a morepork’s life is no more special than that of a blackbird or a sparrow. Yet
if a blackbird or a sparrow had knocked itself out on our deck, though I would
have felt momentarily sorry, I would have been inclined to shrug my shoulders
and leave it to its fate. What a capricious, emotional lot we human beings are.

Footnote: I’m
pleased to say that someone from the Masterton SPCA returned our call soon
after, and was as delighted as we were that the bird had flown.

Friday, April 11, 2014

Australians are perplexed – and I suspect slightly miffed –
that New Zealand is likely to beat them to a new flag.

Stone the crows, cobber, they complain. Aren’t they supposed
to be the rebellious ones?

Australia, after all, is the country that gave us Ned Kelly,
who embodied the spirit of anti-authoritarianism, and the Eureka Stockade
rebellion of 1854, in which Victorian gold miners rose up against the British
colonial government.

New Zealanders, a much more genteel lot, have never displayed
the same eagerness to cast off the shackles of British colonialism. Until
relatively recently we were seen as a distant mirror image of the Mother
Country, stolidly loyal to the Crown, whereas Australia from the very beginning
was determined to forge its own identity.

This can partly be attributed to the high proportion of
Irish in Australia, a group not noted for their affection toward
Britain. Former prime minister Bob Hawke reckoned Australia was the most Irish
country in the world outside Ireland itself.

In the latter part of the 19th century, roughly
one-third of the white Australian population was Irish. Peter Lalor, who led
the Eureka rebels, was an Irishman, while Kelly was the son of an Irish convict
who had been transported to Tasmania.

Perhaps due to the Irish influence, republicanism has always
been a stronger political force in Australia than here, although Australians
voted against becoming a republic by a comfortable margin (55-45) in a 1999
referendum.

Republicanism seems to be off the agenda there now – not
surprisingly, since Liberal Party prime minister Tony Abbott is a former
executive director of Australians for a Constitutional Monarchy, which played a
key role in the “no republic” campaign in 1999.

That aside, Australians still think of themselves as more
overtly nationalistic than New Zealanders. Hence their bewilderment at the fact
that we’re seriously considering dropping the Union Jack from our national flag
– a proposal considered too radical for Australian politicians to contemplate,
even those on the left.

Their puzzlement is compounded by the fact that the idea is
being pushed here by an ostensibly centre-right prime minister, John Key.

In the Australian view of the world, this doesn’t make
sense. As a conservative, Tony Abbott would no sooner drop the Union Jack from
the Australian flag than pass a law allowing same-sex marriage. The same could have
been said of his Liberal Party predecessor, the long-serving John Howard.

But right there you have a clue to the difference between
the two countries, which many Australians fail to understand. Mr Key did pass a law allowing same-sex
marriage – and in doing so, continued a tradition of supposedly conservative
New Zealand governments refusing to conform to standard conservative dogma. His
promotion of a new flag is entirely in line with that tradition.

Even someone as knowledgeable as the high-profile Canberra
political commentator Michelle Grattan doesn’t grasp that we do things differently
over here.Grattan wrote a column on
the proposed flag referendum in which she was plainly surprised that a
centre-right New Zealand government would do something no centre-right
Australian government would contemplate.

But it’s nothing new. New Zealand governments march to a
drumbeat which is often out of synch with conservative agendas elsewhere.

In the 1960s, National prime minister Keith Holyoake resisted
American pressure to commit more New Zealand troops to the Vietnam War. New
Zealand made only a modest contribution to the war effort; enough to show that
we supported the Americans in principle, but no more.

Australia, in contrast, succumbed to American browbeating,
even sending conscripts to fight. Prime Minister Harold Holt became famous for
his craven commitment to go “all the way with LBJ” (American president Lyndon
Baines Johnson).

The Australian commitment in Vietnam continued a pattern of
close co-operation with America that dated back to World War Two. New Zealand,
on the other hand, has increasingly shown a tendency to chart its own course,
under National governments as well as Labour, and particularly since Britain abandoned us for Europe in 1973.

In the 1990s, National under Jim Bolger signed up to the
former Labour government’s nuclear-free policy, although it had caused a deep
rift with both Australia and the United States and continued to be an irritant
in our relationships with Canberra and Washington.

Bolger also tried, without success, to promote republicanism
– another initiative that must have confounded Australian observers who
associated republicanism with the left. I suspect his republican sentiments had
something to do with the fact that he was the son of Irish immigrants.

It was under Bolger, too, that National initiated a
programme of Treaty settlements, which may have been another manifestation of
his Irish sympathy for the victims of colonialism. Again, it was a policy that
ran counter to expectations from a supposedly conservative government.

What it all adds up to is that centre-right governments in
New Zealand don’t always conform to conservative norms. They are essentially
pragmatic; they know they must capture the centre ground to stay in power and
are prepared to compromise conservative principles (and even jettison them
altogether, as in the case of same-sex marriage) if that’s what it takes.

It might not conform to other people’s expectations of us,
but that’s the way we are.

For me, there is a sense of satisfaction in getting the jump
on the Australians over the flag issue.

Our neighbours have an unfortunate habit of treating us
condescendingly. As far as most Australians are concerned, New Zealand might as
well not exist, other than as an object of disparaging jokes about sheep and
fush ’n’ chups. So it startles them when we do something that many of them
probably envy us for.

But the government’s proposal to push ahead with the flag
referendum is consistent with the way we conduct our affairs in other spheres,
where we often demonstrate a more independent spirit than they do (for example,
by refusing to go to war in Iraq, and by limiting our contribution to the
Afghanistan war – an echo of Vietnam).

Let me make a prediction, though. If we decide to adopt a
new flag, whatever the design, the snorts of derision from Australia will be
long and loud. But underneath the bluster, they’ll probably be wishing they’d
done it first.

Saturday, April 5, 2014

SIGH. It’s happened again. Masterton has been back in the
news, and for all the wrong reasons.

The town where I live is also home to the four people found
guilty last week of bashing Featherston supermarket worker Glen Jones to death,
supposedly in revenge for an alleged rape.

It’s also where police raided three properties a few days
ago in a crackdown on cannabis and methamphetamine. Among the seizures was a
loaded sawnoff shotgun.

I could imagine people reading those newspaper stories and
nodding as if to say, “There you go – Masterton again.”

Masterton people are accustomed to a bad press. I call it a
decile 1 to 10 town. Sociologically speaking, there’s a bit of everything here,
from the genteel rich to a few families with multigenerational problems of
violence, drugs, alcohol and welfare dependency.

Inevitably it’s the bad stuff that gets reported. News, by
definition, is anything out of the ordinary, and what’s out of the ordinary is
often bad: crime, car crashes, death and general unpleasantness. Ordinary
people leading good lives – bringing up happy kids, supporting community
organisations, doing useful work, playing sport, paying the bills – are not
newsworthy.

The Masterton of the negative headlines is not the Masterton
I have come to know. It’s not a town of lowlifes and no-hopers, though of
course it has its share. The Masterton I know is a town full of good people.

It’s the town where the family that won $37 million in Lotto
in 2009 has donated more than $1.5 million to the Wairarapa ambulance service.

It’s the town where, according to the nurse who took my
blood recently, the Blood Service gets more donors than anywhere else in the
Wellington region.

It’s the sort of town where, when someone gets cancer, her
friends quickly rally round and organise a roster to drive her to Palmerston
North Hospital each day for treatment.

And here’s another thing. Masterton actually doesn’t feel
like Detroit or Juarez. By that I mean you don’t feel you’re taking your life
in your hands walking down the street.

In more than 10 years here, we have been the victims of only
one crime. Someone – I suspect kids – took advantage of an insecure shed to reach
inside and steal a fishing rod. I hope they have better luck with it than I
had.

My wife and I have now lived here longer than in any other
locality. Our habit of moving house every few years used to be a standing joke
among our friends, but Masterton has cured us of our peripatetic urges. That
speaks for itself.

* * *

IN A PREVIOUS life I once interviewed the great British
actor Donald Pleasence. We talked about eyes.

His own eyes were his most striking feature. They were a pale,
steely, penetrating blue that could give him a quite menacing aura.But Pleasence – a friendly, obliging man
off-screen – reckoned the eyes by themselves communicated nothing. He insisted
it was the accompanying facial expressions that conveyed meaning.

I had trouble accepting this, and still do. I was inclined
to believe, as Shakespeare said, that the eyes are the windows to the soul.

I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve been watching
Kim Dotcom on television, and Dotcom strikes me as contradicting the Pleasence
hypothesis. Even when the Internet Party founder’s face is smiling, his eyes
seem to express distrust, suspicion and hostility.

They invite suspicion and distrust in return. I’ve
decided I’m with Shakespeare on this one.

* * *

PERHAPS the least surprising news so far this year was that
Hutt City Council officials are excited about the prospect of a new sports
stadium at Petone.

Of course they are. Municipal functionaries are always keen
to talk up any proposal that promises glamour and excitement, particularly in
towns that conspicuously lack it.

Besides, it’s easy to get excited when it’s other people’s
money that’s at risk.

Invariably, when such projects are proposed, council
bureaucrats flourish glowing economic reports from obliging consultants.But just watch the bureaucrats and the
consultants go to ground when the stadium turns out to be a dog.

For a cautionary tale, Hutt ratepayers need only look to
Dunedin, where projections for the Forsyth Barr Stadium turned out to be
grossly over-optimistic.

That city is now lumbered with a facility that cost a lot
more than expected and has failed to deliver the promised returns. It’s
massively indebted and running at a loss. Isn’t that always the way?

The proposal for a 12,000-seat stadium at Petone strikes me
as particularly misguided. It’s a permanent solution to a temporary problem –
namely, the embarrassment of the Wellington Phoenix at having to perform in an
almost empty Westpac Stadium. But who’s to say the Phoenix will even exist in
five years?

Friday, April 4, 2014

How the left hate it when international surveys show New
Zealand doing well. It undercuts their basic thesis that the country
desperately needs rescuing from the clutches of cold-hearted capitalists.

Professor Marilyn Waring, who gives the impression of being
a career misery-guts, went to great lengths on Morning Report this morning to pour scorn on an international index
that rated New Zealand No. 1 in the world for social progress.

Waring, who teaches social policy at the Auckland University
of Technology, wasn’t terribly clear about what she didn’t like about the
Social Progress Index. Academics often have difficulty expressing themselves
plainly. But she was certainly keen to talk it down.

I think most New Zealanders are smart enough to understand
that international rankings are not foolproof. However they are a useful guide
to where we stand, and this index – pioneered by Harvard University business
professor Michael Porter – seems a genuine attempt to measure countries’
wellbeing in a more holistic way than by simply looking at gross domestic
product.

That wasn’t good enough for Waring, although she could only
resort to waffle when interviewer Susie Ferguson attempted to establish exactly
what it was that she objected to, or how countries’ wellbeing could be more
accurately measured.

I suspect the basic problem is that academics like Waring
spend much of their time sounding off about all the things that are wrong about
New Zealand, and it’s a huge inconvenience when a reputable research project confirms
that in fact we’re blessed to live in one of the world’s freest and fairest societies.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.